AU CULTUR A platform for the evaluation of the impacts of attendance at cultural events.
What is it?
Au Cultura is a platform under development that seeks to understand how satisfaction is built into a cultural experience. It is a pilot, experimental and multidisciplinary project developed by the Econcult, in close collaboration with the Department of Behavioural Science Methodology of the University of Valencia. and PROS (Research Center on Software Production Methods) of the Universitat Politécnica de València and financed, in its initial stages, by the Valencian Agency of Innovation.
Platform AU CULTURE
Au Cultura is an application that can be used on mobile phones or any other digital platform. It aims to become a democratic tool to evaluate the services that cultural or political institutions can adopt through the use of an interactive platform that produces big data.
The platform is designed to generate a database that allows to understand, at an aggregate level, how satisfaction with participation in a cultural event is built. It allows to evaluate the impacts generated on individuals of different cultural events such as concerts, visits to heritage sites, stage performances, exhibitions, or conferences.
The AU Cultura platform, on the one hand, helps cultural and political organisations to meet the needs and interests of their users, and on the other hand, allows individuals to express their voice and engage in an active cultural dynamic in the city.
What is it for?
The data collected through the platform allows us to:
Investigate the impacts of culture on individuals: analyse similarities and differences according to different artistic activities; analyse the reactions of each specific audience segment; develop comparative research on cultural uses and practices in different communities and territories; study cultural participation from a gender perspective.
Provide information to those who programme cultural events in order to improve knowledge about the audiences who participate in their events.
To better adjust the match between supply and demand of cultural events.
Create a social network of people participating in the cultural life of the community to improve the quality and intensity of cultural experiences.
Background
The evaluation of cultural events has generally consisted of the judgement of critics who publish in more or less specialised spaces. The number of people attending the cultural event has also been used to evaluate the impact, under the assumption that everyone who has attended has received the same impact and similar level of interest, showing identical levels of satisfaction, or that it affects in a similar way in terms of recommendation, loyalty and repetition towards the event. These insufficient audience knowledge strategies mean that there is little real information on the impacts generated by the attendance of users at cultural events, so that the decisions of the people involved (in the field of creation and/or management and programming) are of poor technical quality and can lead to inefficiencies, problems of inclusion and non-fulfilment of objectives. Au Cultura presents a comprehensive approach to measure the impact of cultural participation and the behaviour of cultural users, combining socio-psychological and economic approaches. The model combines contingent evaluation techniques with the analysis of individual characteristics and perceptions of cultural experiences to assess the impacts of cultural participation on individuals. The aim of this model is to enable a comprehensive understanding of the individual's behaviour in the evaluation of cultural experience. This cross-cutting approach overcomes some limitations: the lack of a comprehensive measurement approach, which allows to produce a panoramic picture of cultural consumption and experience, and the difficulty to collect quantitative data regarding the socio-psychological dimension with the existing measurement approach.
How does it work?
The AU Culture platform is divided into three different functionalities and modules. The Persona module consists of a profile questionnaire that collects socio-demographic information, interests and cultural habits of the users. Depending on the data entered in this section, the user will be associated to one Cultotype or another. The Cultotype is a cultural profile that defines what type of cultural consumer the user is. The definition of the Cultotype is based on the Latent Class Analysis. The part called Event shows various events taking place in the city where the user is geolocated. The application becomes a virtual cultural agenda. After having participated in a specific event, the user will be able to evaluate it through the Evaluation Questionnaire. In this part, the Au Culture platform presents a comprehensive approach to measure the individual impacts of cultural participation and the behaviour of cultural users, combining socio-psychological and economic approaches. The model combines contingent evaluation techniques with perception analysis of cultural experiences to assess the cognitive, aesthetic, emotional and social impacts of cultural participation. Finally, users can compare their results with those of other users who have evaluated the same event.
Au Culture is a non-profit public service tool that is being tested in collaboration with the Observatori Cultura de la Universitat de València and the Conselleria de Cultura de la Generalitat Valenciana. The platform will be tested in different European cities through the European H2020 project MESOC. The intention is to test the prototype in Valencia in order to extend its use to the rest of Europe.
What are its characteristics?
- includes a holistic approach in the evaluation framework.
- provides quantitative data.
- there is no interviewer-dominated data collection process is user-driven.
AU_CULTUR is an application designed by Econcult and whose development has been funded by the Valencian Innovation Agency. It is currently in the prototyping phase and is being tested in the framework of the MESOC project.
